Project finance partner Karen Wong '86 will chair Reunion 2011
-By Lori Craig
Karen Wong ’86 never expected to find both success and personal fulfillment at a big firm doing project finance.
“I kind of fell into the industry, luckily,” says Wong, a partner in the Global Project Finance Group of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Wong specializes in the financing of clean energy projects and has represented sponsors and financing parties in numerous multimillion- and multibillion-dollar deals.
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| Karen Wong '86 |
“My goal was to do really interesting, exciting work and see where it took me.”
Hailing from a Trojan family (her husband, two siblings, father and four aunts and uncles all went to USC), Wong built strong connections to the school as an accounting undergraduate and then at USC Law, where she received a Shattuck Award for her “potential for becoming an outstanding member of the bar.”
As chair of Reunion 2011, she is looking forward to reconnecting with former classmates at her 25th class reunion, to be held June 25 at the Fairmont Miramar in Santa Monica, Calif., with 10 other USC Law classes from 1961 through 2006.
“It’s a great opportunity to rekindle friendships,” Wong says. “Especially as you get older, you look at the things that matter. Work is always there, but it’s the personal relationships that are meaningful.”
An accounting major, Wong anticipated graduating law school and finding a business-related job. Following her second year, thanks to an interesting international tax course, she took a summer job with a boutique tax firm.
“It turned out that tax work, after spending 12 weeks doing it, was going to be really boring,” Wong says. “I spent the summer writing memos and researching, spending a lot of time in the library … and I just thought, ‘I’m never going to see a client for five years at this rate.’”
Upon graduation, Wong changed direction and joined Jones Day, excited by the possibilities of working in a large international firm, yet she quickly found herself specializing in the area in which she has practiced for 24 years.
As the only one of six new associates in the firm committed to doing transactional work, Wong was soon working on the first project finance deal to take place in Los Angeles, the funding of a power project located in Carson, Calif. That project led to a series of assignments, including one in which Wong’s firm represented three syndicate banks while Milbank — then one of the more active project financing firms — represented the lead agent bank. Realizing she’d prefer to be on the front line of negotiating, Wong joined Milbank in 1990.
Since then, she has continued to focus on the energy sector, restructuring the Mojave wind farms in Tehachapi, Calif., advising the sponsors of a lignite-fired project in Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and securing a $1.45-billion federal loan guarantee for an Arizona solar project. Having wrapped up several overseas projects, today Wong spends less time traveling and more time with her husband, 8-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter.
Her rich balance in life is admired by those close to her, such as Dr. Mitchell Lew, president of the USC Asian Pacific Alumni Association, who also serves on the USC Alumni Association Board of Governors and is a member of the USC Associates.
“Karen is one of the few people I know who is able to balance a career, marriage, parenting and friendships with the absolute highest level of success,” Lew says.
Wong is excited to see an influx of projects closer to home as emphasis has shifted to renewable, clean energy including wind and solar. Wong and her team have handled a couple hundred such projects in the past 10 years.
“It’s still the same interesting legal work,” Wong says. “What I like is that my practice is pretty mixed. I’ve represented lenders, sponsors, construction companies and other players in the mix, which keeps the focus of my legal work fresh and interesting all the time.”
-As seen in the Summer 2011 USC Law Deliberations
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